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Tuesday, 10 January 2012

Terrain is everything - Heads-up

The other day I brought the joys of a site called Artificial Owl to your collective consciousnesses and I hope you got some fantastic inspiration from those pictures. Maybe you also managed to guess one of my new projects, that 'To Do List' keeps getting bigger instead of smaller! I keep asking myself why I'm adding another piece of terrain to that list when I have plenty already and we're not even playing with it. Not to mention unfinished terrain quite a few people would like to see done, Cathedral Tower anyone? But I think I answered the big question in the last post:

"I could see something unique and inspired, a cool looking terrain piece, a viable gaming structure, a creative challenge and something that's core material would be relatively cheap"

and if you recall the thing I enjoy most about 'the hobby' is the terrain building so I guess it's moot point given the focus of my passion. Anyway, were my subtle clues to my project too subtle or where they hidden sneakily in plain sight?

I give you President Ferdinand Marcos:

Can you see why I got so excited? It's a ruined building, but not a building. Now, once you add in a polystyrene head [£6.98 including postage from ebay] you have the start of a really cool terrain piece. So, gues what my brother got me for Christmas [after I told him to].

Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't an easy task and there's no STC I can prepare for it [or can I?]. The head is solid Polystyrene so I'm unsure about how to go about carving it inside. I've thought about using it to attempt some paper-mache effect but then how do I take the 'cladding off' and fill in the internal structure? There's a lot to resolve but this baby is 14" tall and once embedded into a hillside will make a really cool piece of terrain with at least three storeys to it.The other big question is do I go Ferron Rockcrete [which I don't want to do], sandstone, so it looks cool jutting out of a Ferron hillside, or alternatively go Statue of Liberty on it and Copper plate the thing in wonderfully weathered panels, hmm...

Although you could always go the complete line of sight blocker and go all Prometheus on it? It seems big heads are 'on trend'.

It's another long-term project so we'll see how it goes. I'm sure I'll have a moment of intense activity only for it to cool off and be left half-finished. Meanhwhile, the wife has noticed I have more terrain than we can ever field, not that we've played a game in a good while and she's beginning to question why? She mentioned selling stuff, to which I pointed out the issues with that and my reluctance to part with anything I've actually 'created'